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How Long Before I Can 3D Print a Replacement Body for Myself?

A couple weeks ago I turned 60. I remember how old 60 was when I was a kid, and now I’m here.

As a person who spends a lot of time asking “what if” questions, constantly thinking about extreme possibilities, the notion of 3D printing a replacement body for myself became very intriguing.

I remember seeing science fiction movies where cloned bodies were grown over long periods of time, and more recent ones with accelerated cloning technology, but the 3D printing of replacement bodies is a faster option, just now coming into view.

Bioprinting is the process of using 3D printers to form human tissue. This process that has already been used to print replacement kidneys, bladders, livers, skin, bones, teeth, noses, and ears, as well as prosthetic arms and legs. This is a list that didn’t even exist 5 years ago, but is now growing on a regular basis.

As incomprehensible as it may sound today, printing an entire replacement body for myself may only be a decade or two away. But it is also a topic steeped in massive controversy, with moral, spiritual, and ethical implications that we haven’t even begun to debate.

Once again, this is an area of science with a quickly escalating race to be first. The first person to 3D an entire human body will very likely win the Nobel Prize in Medicine and will be invited to all the world’s A-list functions. So who wouldn’t want win this race.

With this swirling cauldron of competing forces in play, I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who would relish the opportunity to move into an 18-20 year old version of my own body. Yet, at the same time, this technology will be opening the mother of all cans of worms. Here’s why.

When will we be able to 3D print a replacement arm?

3D Printing Vs. Cloning

Is 3D printing the human body better than cloning?

Science fiction has been taking us down the path of human cloning, but until now, few have even considered the option of 3D printing an entire body.

Recently researchers at the Oregon Health and Science University made a major breakthrough by cloning human embryonic stem cells by transferring the nucleus of one cell to another.

Starting with the skin cells from a child with a genetic disease, scientists infused them with donated human eggs to create human embryos that were genetically identical to the child. Then, in a process similar to the one used to create Dolly the sheep back in 1996, they extracted stem cells from those embryos.

The researchers then took an adult cell from the patient’s body and sucked out the central portion of the DNA. They injected the material into an egg (one that has been stripped of genetic material) donated by another human volunteer. The genetic material from the adult cell instructs the empty egg cell how to continue with its development.

But is the “cloning” approach, or creating lab-grown tissue and organs, better than 3D printing, or do we need a combination of both?

The process for 3D printed human tissue uses cartridges filled with “Bioink,” derived from extracted cells from patient biopsies. These cells are cultured in a growth medium, allowing them to multiply.

Once enough cells have grown, they’re harvested and loaded into a cartridge as a form of BioInk. The cost of “Bioink” is currently in the range of $5,000 per gram, but that price will plummet as new techniques are created for developing it.

Organovo, a 3D human tissue manufacturer, in partnership with Autodesk has developed the first software for 3D Bioprinting. The goal of these companies is to begin printing a variety of organs to aid thousands of people who are on the waiting list for organ transplant.

“We are on the verge of transitioning from
‘prosthetic’ body parts to ‘real’ replacements!”

Organ Printing

We are on the verge of transitioning from “prosthetic” body parts to “real” replacements. 3D printing is helping us transition from the crudely functional and cosmetic, to “bioprinting” a range of actual organs and living body parts to cure a wide range of medical conditions. Here’s a quick rundown of where we stand today.

Skulls – Doctors at University Medical Center Utrecht, in Holland, have successfully performed the first surgery to completely replace a patient’s skull with a tailor-made plastic version that was 3-D printed.

Noses and Ears – A team at Cornell University is printing 3-D molds of a patient’s ear using ink gels containing living cells. The printed products are injected with bovine cartilage cells and rat collagen and incubated until they are ready three months later.

Synthetic Skin – James Yoo and his team at the Wake Forest School of Medicine have developed a printer that will print skin directly onto the wounds of burn victims. The “ink” used consists of enzymes and collagen which once printed are layered with tissue cells and skin cells which combine to form the skin graft.

Vaginas – Wake Forest has also conducted breakthrough research on tissue-engineered vaginas implanted in four women, aged 13 to 18 years, with a condition known as Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser syndrome that causes the vagina to be underdeveloped or absent. No, this is not a 3D printing process yet, but eight years after transplantation, the organs continue to function as if they were natural tissue and all recipients are sexually active, report no pain, and are satisfied with their arousal, lubrication, and orgasm.

Breasts – Women with mastectomies are lining up for the first clinical trials at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia that will use 3D-printed “scaffolds’’ to regenerate their breasts using fat cells. Liposuction will be used to remove the fat cells from the stomach area, which will be injected into a scaffold designed to dissolve over two or three years as the fatty breast tissue regenerates.

Kidneys – In August last year the Hangzhou Dianzi University in China announced it had created biomaterial that was 3D printed into a small working kidney that lasted four months.

Livers – On average, there are 16,000 people on the waiting list for every liver transplant. Dr. Nizar Zein, Medical Director of Liver Transplantation in Cleveland has spearheaded an effort to develop 3D printed livers. So far, Cleveland surgeons have used the 3D livers in about 25 surgeries.

Bones & Limbs – One of the more established fields of 3-D printing is the bioprinting of human bone implants, and now replacement bones. We’ve also gotten very good at 3D printing prosthetic arms and legs, but so far no one has managed to bioprint a replacement finger or arm and reattach it with fully-reconnected nerve endings.

This list represents a small piece of the work going on around the world. Over the coming years we will see an exponential growth curve surrounding these accomplishments.

It’s always good to have a spare, right?

Extreme Ethical Dilemmas

With all the work being done in this area, it’s inevitable that someone will mastermind the 3D printing of an entire human body.

3D printed body parts, skin, and organs are far less controversial than printing an entire person. Here are some short scenarios to highlight many of the crazy ethical dilemmas we’ll be facing in the future:

1. Replacement Body Scenario – As people age, their bodies begins to fail. It’s only natural for them to wish to move into a younger body. But creating a replacement body, even an earlier version of yourself, is only part of a much larger challenge for future humans. Transferring brain functions from one body to another, moving conscious and unconscious memories, reassigning skills, and motor functions is problematic on many fronts.

How will we know if the transfer is complete? How will we know if something got corrupted along the way, if we’ve overwritten brain cells, created false or phantom memories, or left memories disconnected completely. Is it possible to test for brain failures, make repairs, or reboot specialized areas of the brain? And, once the transfer is complete, how will we dispose of the “used” body after the process is complete?

2. Printing Super Humans – Printing a replacement person is one thing, but printing an entirely new person with superior strength, healing power, and mental capabilities takes us even further into unchartered territory. Downloading the best parts of 12 different personalities, adding extra muscle memory, coordination, dexterity, and mental acuity sounds great on the surface, but who gets to decide? Complicating things even further, why do we need to restrict ourselves to just human traits when we can add the eyesight of an eagle, the speed of a cheetah, or the radar senses of a bat? Will these “people” still be human? Do they have a soul? Will they have the same legal rights as other humans?

3. Printing Tiny or Extra Large Humans – We already know the size and shape of existing humans, but why is that a limitation? If we are reinventing humanity, why not consider small people, maybe only 10”-12” in height, or super large people maybe 10’-20’ tall? What advantages could they provide?

4. Colonizing Other Planets with “Build-a-Human Kits” – Since sending people into space as been problematic, what if we only sent the necessary “human” ingredients along with a 3D printer to automatically build people upon landing, with downloadable personalities stored on servers, and the resources to make them the official colonizers of new worlds.

5. Creating Exotic Human Hybrids – Would people be better off with 3 arms, 4 legs, chimp-like feet, mosquito-proof skin, diamond-hard teeth, a backup heart, and extra sex organs? If we 3D print humans from scratch, why would we be bound by our current limitations? At what point do we stop being human?

How long before we can 3D print an entire body?

Final Thoughts

Is our own body the essence of who we are, or is it just a container for our consciousness? If it’s just a container, the next logical question is, can human consciousness be transferred from one body to another?

Science fiction is struggling to keep pace with the 3D printing revolution, especially when it comes to reinventing human biology. We are on the verge of dealing with questions so difficult it makes our head hurt even thinking about them, but we need to begin the debate before the issues arise.

Piece by piece, medical researchers are on the fast-track to 3D print an entire human.

No, we still can’t reprint a severed finger and reattach it to full functionality. Also, no one has figured out how to print an entire human heart. And no, we can’t reprint a human brain and flip some sort of switch to turn it on. Well, at least not yet.

If we start with the assumption that 3D printing the entire human body is imminent, what’s your guess? How long before we see this kind of headline? Your life decisions from here on out may depend on it!

25 Responses to “How Long Before I Can 3D Print a Replacement Body for Myself?”

Comments List

Randy Grein

Interesting, although the final paragraphs regarding ‘improvements’ and mods is, well, short-sighted. We already know why a 12″ human isn’t possible – the brain would be too small for much intelligence. Likewise larger humans is a huge problem (pun intended). The square/cube problem in sizing would make a 20′ tall human cannot be made the same way that a 6′ human is designed, they would simply break. Thicker everything, massive muscles, extra blood vessel valves like giraffes to compensate for height variations.

Then we have the ‘improvements’ idea. It’s very easy to suggest improvements be made. It’s another thing entirely to make them. More often ‘improvements’ are simply shifting parameters – gaining strength, for example at the expense of endurance or organism toughness, size (for battle or large scale work) at the expense of lifespan and fine motor control. Just try to improve the immune system and it becomes VERY clear that improvements in one area reduce effectiveness in another.

FuturistSpeaker

The variables I suggested were intended to help people expand their thinking about less obvious options and the dangers involved. So could the military find uses for 12″ or 20′ humans? You’re assuming all future humans should have the same capabilities as existing humans and that may not be the case.

In a similar fashion, you’re assuming imbalances are bad, and any deviation from “normal” (whatever normal is) is less than optimal. I’m certainly not an expert on human biology, but time and again we’ve figured out workarounds for things we’ve long assumed were barriers.

Tom, I really appreciate your thoroughness in looking at both the promise and the potential perils of this exciting,new technology. Too often, as inventors, we can become blind to the possible unintended consequences of a new technology. Think global warming, for example.

At the core of your article is the fundamental question, “Who are we?” Are we the sum total of the mechanisms of our bodies and brains? Are we our bodies, or are we inhabiting our bodies? If we are inhabiting our bodies, is there some way we can make a jump to a new cloned or 3d printed body?

Once again, I really found this article to be insightful and interesting. Thanks again for job well done!

FuturistSpeaker

I think you’re overestimating the time it will take for this to happen. With the exponential growth happening in this area, we may indeed see the first 3D printed body within the next 10-20 years, and very rapid advancement after that point. Replacement organs will be even sooner, with cures for diabetes just around the corner, so do count this option out.

Gear Mentation

You should see a cure for diabetes within the next 20 years or less. After that, various partial solutions to the diseases of aging should keep you alive to the point where you can transition to a different kind of body, even if your pessimistic assessment is correct.

Robert Knecht

A very timely article. I teach a project design course for first-year students. We are design a workshop using high-tech equipment. The students enjoyed the article and it spurred their motivation to explore shop technology for the future. The article takes the technology to a new level, but also introduces the ethical issues. I appreciate reading these articles and enjoy sharing the information with my students.

41S147E

I’v often wondered why – when hear of an accident, the person had a leg crushed… and I wonder – well if the flesh and muscle is ok – why the heck can’t we implant new bone, and reattach muscle and ligaments…. with 3D printing, and the right materials… THAT will be a major breakthrough to all serious injuries. Joint replacement for those with various arthritic joint problems. the future looks wonderful for replacement bits n pieces that would otherwise be “removed” after a major accident.
The talk about transfer of consciousness, memory, ‘personality’ is far far far away…. if even ever possible! in the meantime probably best to find a way to regenerate new brain cells in existing brain.
As for a soul – again.. best stay in your existing but renewed body… than risk transfer and leave your soul behind . assuming there is one of course.

Sam Turner

A large matter which has interested me greatly is the potential this sort of technology would have to transgender/transsexuals. You could print the organs you want, and even things like stem cells could be used to rewire everything to a biologically realistic extent

FuturistSpeaker

You are correct. We have the potential for creating multi-gender people with multiple sex organs. Beyond that, people will envision ways to create “less messy” orgasms with hypersensitized body patches for future human forms of intimacy. Creative people will take this far beyond anything we can imagine today.

Mauro De Rose

Very interesting. I read that you have got very good at 3D printing prosthetic arms and legs, but so far no one has managed to bioprint a replacement finger or arm and reattach it with fully-reconnected nerve endings. Have any further developments fingers been made?

It has become obvious that the center of consciousness is the brain, and less obviously, that the brain seems to be our souls’ link to this world. Many of our Veterans and Protective/Emergency Services, not to mention our privileged few who could afford to, could benefit from replacement tissues, limbs, or a body. Would a DNA/Stem Cell facsimile feel like the original? Would we need to learn muscle memory all over again with a faster, more agile body? At what point would we choose to die? Could we double our life span?

Matt Marquis

Thank you for such a wonderful piece of, what’s now mostly speculation.
Getting the mechanics down will be a trick, but, perhaps trickier will be the bit about transfer of consciousness, and then, is it copy/paste resulting in two of “you”, or a process of cut/paste?

Another alternative lies with artificial/prosthetic brains. There’s already some promising work underway in designing an artificial Hippocampus (the gateway to memory, among other things). If we transitioned our consciousness over to detachable plug-n-play artificial brains, then, there’d only ever be one consciousness transfer, and any other body swapping afterward would be a matter of taking the artificial brain and plugging it into a different body.

Of course, opening up the availability of physical diversity brings to question issues of identity. Fingerprints would be useless. Retinal scans would be useless too. Anything physical about a person would be useless as identification.

Further, regarding identity, such a process could allow anyone of any ethnicity, gender, to be any other ethnicity, or gender, and possibly even augmented species.
It’d certain redraw a number of lines commonly used in discrimination since the dawn of man.

We could all, possibly then, identify as human, together, without the age old classical prejudices.

Tom Jones

I think the article misses the point that printing a new body would be far far far more straightforward than transferring a person to a replacement for their brain. Therefore the likely way this would be used would be either by printing a new body and transferring your existing head to it – people who know you might not even notice, but you would be much healthier, or by printing a new body and transferring your existing brain to it – brain aging problems not caused by the body would continue, but all other health problems would be fixed.

This also avoids most of the ethical problems you mentioned, and I think it is important that people know about it as a realistic option that we should be working towards.

Gear Mentation

Yes exactly… we would transfer our own brains. It’s a lot easier to keep a single organ healthy than a myriad of organs, and also by the time we can print a body we should be well on our way to transferring our minds to non-bio implants

Regarding the bioprinting of an entire human being: this is what the Bible refers to when it mentions “the abomination”. within the next ten years this field will advance rapidly because of the many applications for human health and longevity. but then this power can and will be abused to make pseudo-human sex slaves, etc. Pedophiles, perverts, and the average man or woman will be able to indulge themselves with bioprinted pseudo-humans. These beings will be man made and not made by God (through the process of evolution), which is why they are called the abomination.

Will these “people” still be human? Do they have a soul? At what point do we stop being human?

That’s like asking, “On a scale of one to ten, what’s your favorite color of the alphabet?” Any question that invokes humanness or the soul may as well be a schizophrenic word-salad.

It’s nonsense because there’s no such thing as humanness! There is no dividing line between one species and another. There are only gradients. Moreover, even if you ignore the gradient, There is nothing special about humans. We are temporary. And we are just as inanimate as the processes that created us. We WILL be replaced either by whatever outcompetes us, or whatever we become in the future. All that technologies such as this really serve to do is forcibly remind of how special we never were in the first place!

Even the concept of personal identity is dubious. Every time we remember something, we also rewrite that memory. In little over a year, every cell in our bodies, save nervous cells, is replaced. And even our nervous cells completely reconfigure their connections! One could say nervous cells can’t divide, which draws a very convenient line in the sand. But even they can be replaced through the body’s cache of nervous stem cells.

These questions all boil down to anthropocentrism: regarding our “species” as the central element of the universe. Anthropocentrism is one of the most arrogant, childish, and even primitive ideas in our history! All animals assume they’re the center of the universe, but most don’t have the intellect to question this assumption. We can, but instead we dismiss this ability and give in to our animal arrogance.

Clinging to the nonexistent identity of “human” only holds us back from becoming something greater than we are. If you give up that fairy tale, and replace it with something like “sapient being,” then you’ll realize how stupid it is to ask whether or not you should transcend the limits nature produced in you.

Gear Mentation

Printing the brain isn’t even something we should be thinking about. There is no reason to do such a thing, because it’s unlikely we’d ever want to. It seems as if it would come long after we learned how to transfer our consciousness to more durable mediums than biology. Printing a biological body is an intermediate solution to keep our own brain alive and functional in the world, before we graduate to non-or partially biological bodies. So what we need to be thinking about is a) brain health and b) creating an interface between the brain stem and a body. Then you print everything but the brain, and transplant the brain.

Stephen Schieberl

Just now encountering this. Say that we manage to create a scanner which can map out every atom in a given space. Then we pair that with a printer which can plot those atoms back using a 0.1nm-accurate head and an elemental-atom-cartridge. At that level of a perfect copy, I would assume that a human print would have the same memories and skills as the original. If so, this would prove that we are chemical beings whose consciousness boils down to protein imprints made up of some basic atoms, and that the soul is simply a concept we’ve used to describe something we didn’t previously understand about ourselves.

This is assuming, of course, that the issues with scan and print speed, and suspension of floating atoms in the plot, get sorted out.